Sexuality

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay on Friday urged the Ugandan government to shelve a “draconian” draft bill on homosexuality that is due to be put before the Ugandan parliament later in January, saying it would bring the country into a direct collision with established international human rights standards aimed at preventing discrimination. She welcomed recent statements by the President and other senior members of the Government, suggesting it might intervene to stop the private member’s bill from becoming law.

More than two-thirds of African countries have laws criminalizing homosexual acts, and despite accounting for a significant percentage of new infections in many countries, men who have sex with men tend to be left out of the HIV response. "[They] are going underground; they are hiding themselves and continuing to fuel the epidemic," UNAIDS executive director Michél Sidibé told IRIN/PlusNews recently. "We need to make sure these vulnerable groups have the same rights everyone enjoys: access to information, care and prevention for them and their families." IRIN/PlusNews has compiled a short list of human rights violations against gay Africans:

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has indicated he will not back a bill that would impose the death sentence for the crime of "aggravated homosexuality" - when an HIV-positive person has sex with anyone who is disabled or under the age of 18. Museveni appears to have bowed to international pressure, telling members of his ruling National Resistance Movement that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had all urged him to ensure the controversial bill does not go ahead.

Last March, three American evangelical Christians, whose teachings about “curing” homosexuals have been widely discredited in the United States, arrived here in Uganda’s capital to give a series of talks. The theme of the event, according to Stephen Langa, its Ugandan organizer, was “the gay agenda — that whole hidden and dark agenda” — and the threat homosexuals posed to Bible-based values and the traditional African family.

Uganda will drop the death penalty and life imprisonment for gays in a refined version of an anti- gay bill expected to be ready for presentation to Parliament in two weeks, James Nsaba Buturo, the minister of ethics and integrity, said. The draft bill, which is under consideration by a parliamentary committee, will drop the two punishments to attract the support of religious leaders who are opposed to these penalties, Buturo said today in a phone interview from the capital, Kampala.

What have gay rights activists in Christian-majority Uganda and Muslim women fighting for family law reform in Asia got in common? You’d be surprised…On 14 October 2009, an “Anti-Homosexuality Bill” was tabled before the Ugandan parliament. The Bill not only provides extreme punishments for lesbians and gays but also anyone who supports their human rights or fails to report a ‘suspected homosexual’ to the authorities.

Transsexuals in the Gulf call Bahraini lawyer Fawziya Janahi "guardian angel". She is the Arab world's only female lawyer who takes up cases on behalf of clients who want to change their sex. Janahi's clients want legal permission to undergo sex change operations. While the law is quite straightforward on this in Bahrain, the lawyer says it is more difficult in other countries in the region.